drown my sorrow
by Experimental
Summary: For his partner's sake he would become a willing sacrifice. Some would call that love. He would say it was just better than the alternative. Hisoka. Muraki.


A/n: Prompted by discussions of Muraki/Hisoka in the forums here. In other fandoms I might warn of dark themes and character death, but this is _Yami no Matsuei_; I think it's just a little too redundant.

* * *

drown my sorrow

I die again tonight.

Blood drains me, soaking the grass that sprouts up from the cracks in the pavement. Leaving me so weak I can no longer see my breath in the cold air. Leaving me cold as the cold air, and pale as frost.

And life slowly leaves.

It slips away like sand in an hourglass, sand through my fingers, and I cannot grab hold of it again. These fingers are numb. My whole being is numb and I cannot move a muscle except to blink back frozen tears. There is a disconnect. Signals severed. Nerves severed. Arteries severed. Tenuous fibers are all that keep this broken thing that man once called his doll together, strings that cannot mend themselves fast enough, they are too damaged.

The man who murdered me has learned a lot since then. He knows how to prolong the pain until death finally comes like an answered prayer. Through experimentation and practice, the tools of the trade, he has learned to draw out the very moment of my death, bend the rules that govern my cells, make sure I never get off easy as year after year I relive the night I was damned.

His hands close around my throat. His scalpels pierce my flesh, slide deep inside me, tear me open. His words tear me open, leave me to lie in a pool of blood that never dries.

Except instead of clean earth and spring blossoms there will be moldering leaves and autumn fog. Instead of the red moon of the eclipse I get a sodium-streetlight orange sky, to make up for the fire that has gone missing from those cold eyes. Instead of dark whispers echoing in my ears, the indifferent cry of crickets and katydids.

And here I will lie, screwed and crucified—burned at the stake, at the cellular level, dragged through the coals and desecrated—strangled, poisoned—impaled, eviscerated, torn limb from limb. Deconstructed, piece by piece.

Strung on a wire, mounted on a concrete slab. Humiliated, violated, and tortured.

Martyred.

And still I come back.

And for some reason even I can barely grasp, I return to that man.

It is not death that frightens me, that wakes me up in a cold sweat and banishes sleep to the periphery of my existence. Death loses its sting for those who have been stung by it before, stung so many times they become immune, those who just seal themselves back up and keep going.

Nor am I afraid of dying. It all starts to run together after that first rending pain. I have known agony, and this is not it. I have known betrayal, and this is not it. There are much worse things than this. This is a trifle to pay, and I will do it all again willingly when I'm called for—for _his_ sake, that he may drown his sorrows in my blood.

That he may never have to come here himself.

That he may never experience pain again on account of me or my killer.

That he may never have this one more thing to dig under his skin like a splinter worked deep down and infected, one more demon to haunt him, one more sin for which he will never forgive himself.

I would rather it be me who remains unforgiven, and some tell me that is love.

To me it is nothing more than the lesser of two evils. It is simply easier than the alternative.

My killer holds a cigarette between his lips and lights it with a wooden match. The orange glow illuminates the profile of his white face, hidden behind silver hair and silver frames that that tiny flame can never reach. He removes the cigarette with long fingers red and sticky with my blood, and exhales. Smoke dissipates in the fog from between his lips, the only warmth from his cold, cold presence.

"What do you really think you can accomplish, Boy?"

He says his lines, goes through the motions. I hear the hatred in his voice, the derision, but I feel . . . nothing.

"Do you really think you can keep me from him? Do you really believe _you_ can satisfy me, by giving yourself in his place? You . . . You don't even know what this hunger is, how deep it runs, like a monster coiled in its hole. . . . You flatter yourself if you think the likes of you can placate it."

And yet that is precisely what I am doing, what he allows me to do, if only for a little while, and what I will do again.

And again.

And, when that monster gets hungry, again. . . .

He takes another drag on the cigarette, and his voice is low and steady when he speaks, vibrating through what's left of my body.

"He isn't deserving of it," he says. "Your _sacrifice_." The word is a bitter pill in his mouth. "You know that, don't you? Your selflessness will not redeem him. His blood is tainted, and you . . ." He lowers his eyes—to my blood, on his hands, on his cigarette. "You're not exactly pure either."

I refute nothing. I haven't the strength to move my lips, my vocal chords. I cannot even turn my eyes away from this cruel angel.

What would I say if I could? I know what he claims is true. I don't have the evidence to support it. I just know.

When I say nothing he turns to me and departs from the script. He hovers over me. He peers at me with one narrowed eye, the other thankfully hidden beneath his hair. I almost wish it were not. At least then I could see the monster he speaks of as being inside, rather than the pitiful mortal man he appears on the outside, white coat soaked and spotted in blood that might as well be his own for all the desperation that's in that one eye.

"Tell me, Boy."

His gaze flickers over my ruined body, unable to rest until he finds the answer he seeks inside it.

"Do you have a death wish?"

Hate rises off him like steam, like smoke from his cigarette, sticking biting in the back of the throat under the cloying copper scent of blood—unadulterated resentment unsatisfied by everything he has done. It is bottomless. It warps everything around him like a black hole. He is sinking in it, and it is all he can do to pull me down with him, to drown me in his sorrow.

He strokes the lines he tattooed into my soul years ago with the fingers that hold the cigarette. His touch has the fondness of a lover, but I know better. The fire his touch ignites on my tattered skin makes the falling cigarette ash feel like a cool salve. It is the private hell he found and gave to me like something precious, anything other than what it was, long before he ever sent me to Hades. Somehow I can still feel it fresh as the day he carved it into me.

Like a child writing its name into its favorite doll. And the ink never fades.

"Because if that's the case, then should it not follow that when I did this to you all those years ago, I did you a favor?"

And he smiles.

Like the cat that got the cream he smiles, but I sense his fear. A fear that I might answer, that I might show him this gratitude he says he deserves and undo everything he has set so carefully in motion—all the loathing that was writ into his doll, all the suffering that was programmed to afflict me past the grave, all the evil that made me his.

With what remains of my strength, I will my lips to move, to form a curse, but in the end I can only mouth his name; I can only voice the first syllable.

He is so careful, and yet I feel it in him.

The terror.

That for a moment he thought, really thought, that I was going to forgive him.

The knife slides into me cool through the licking flames and I don't fight the darkness that slowly wraps me in its shroud. I have no fear of death. In my line of work, it cannot come soon enough. It's the only way I can wake from this voluntary recurring nightmare, my only comfort the knowledge that when I wake he'll have left me, like he left me the morning I died for the first time.

—o—

_Carnival, 2007._


End file.
